Love, love, love…

All you need is love

All you need is love

All you need is love, love

Love is all you need.

The Beatles

Post Christmas, I had a lovely four-day break in Hobart with my lovely partner, sans our lovely children…first time in over a decade.  Funny thing is, we missed our flight home.  My fault entirely.  I’d never have made such a silly blunder if travelling with the kids on my own, which I’ve done several times (well, without their Dad anyway).  I highlight (literally) every itinerary item obsessively and check and re-check dates and times because I simply can’t trust myself not too.  I’m a tad daffy I’m afraid.  The Virgin check-in person-whatever-his-title-actually-is looked at me bored when I trilled breathlessly, “We’ve missed our plane…I don’t know how…we were waiting around all afternoon just sitting in the sun…la la la la” and responded, dead pan, “Missed it, the plane’s almost landed”!

Freudians, read into my error as you will.  I’ve got a few theories of my own that don’t rely on the scatterbrain excuse.

Hobart is so pretty.  We stayed in the North and it reminds me of Fitzroy (Melbourne), only less pretentious and more friendly, with students lolling about in crumpled clothes and odd socks and lots of trees and broad, open streets.  I’m not here to wax lyrical about Hobart (and trust me I could go on for days about MONA, about how it’s like descending into a Hades underworld…another time).  I do want to talk about love though.  I don’t really even like the above quoted Beatles anthem; I’m not the world’s greatest Beatles admirer, I confess.  I’ve always found the song a bit lollipop, a bit trite, smug even.  After all, it’s easy to croon about the virtue of love when you’re a Beatle.  I suspect there’s not much left to prove after that.

But when I reflect on having seen Lion at the fabulous old deco State Cinema in Elizabeth St., which raises themes I do want to talk about, the song annoyingly starts playing in my head.  Yeah, yeah, nearly everyone’s seen the movie now.  At the time I’d read very little about it, but the confluence of being in Tassie and it being about an actual Tasmanian family seemed fitting.  Don’t want to be a spoiler, but I wish I’d taken a whole box of tissues with me – I didn’t have a single one in my backpack – and confess to sobbing intently throughout most of the film.  Imagine my mascara!  I couldn’t even manage to cry out one eye, like I sometimes do, depending on who’s beside me, but then decided “Never mind”, because whilst gentleman next to me was softly bawling, the woman directly across the aisle just pulled the rip cord and was quavering and snorting, her nose audibly full of snot.

What resonated for me about the movie takes me back to a conversation I had with a dear friend just prior to going away.  We were talking about books over salad bagels and cups of tea and she lent me A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara.  It’s a bit bashed about – dog-eared and stained and obviously devoured, if somewhat slowly.  It’s tough going, by all accounts.  It’s also a bloody big book.  We’re both mums.  Novels, the delicious things, don’t get read so fast these days.  I’m yet to read it.  I asked her how the book had impressed her and she answered thoughtfully thus:

Even when one has had terrible tragedy or trauma in one’s life, if one can experience or touch love, then it seems that one is lucky after all or, at least, has lived a worthy life.

Just recently at the uniform shop at my kids’ school, Lion popped into the conversation and one of the Mums recounted how she was touched by the love Saroo, the protagonist, had for both mothers.  I quipped back that it was the love between the brothers, little six-year-old Saroo and Guddo, that killed me.

When your mother works as a labourer moving rocks in a quarry in central India (judging by the way adult Saroo’s college friends baulked at the recollection, his family was of the “Untouchables” caste) and you’ve a little sister to boot, you must depend on an older sibling for very survival.  By necessity, Guddo was”parentified”, a proxy father figure (the father’s absence is conspicuously unexplained) who assumed many of the responsibilities usually reserved for adults in more economically flush countries, including basic tasks like feeding and cleaning and more complex ones like supervision, teaching and discipline.  Not even an adolescent by the looks of it, Guddo’s quest to find some temporary work to relieve his family sets in motion the trail of loss…

What seemed obvious, however, was that the real bond between the brothers was one of love, not survival.  The portrayal of tenderness between them was aching.  The way Saroo looked up to his brother, preferring his company; the way Guddo “held” Saroo, comforting him by stroking his face to sleep, reassuring him with promises of jellies (“jalebi”) and a full tummy, playing with him and looking out for his little shadow like it was never an option not to…because he loved him.  They loved each other.  A capacity bestowed upon them by the love shown to them by their mother.

Back in the 1950s, American psychologist Harry Harlow demonstrated how baby rhesus monkeys, separated from their mothers, preferred to spend time with a terry cloth maternal “surrogate”, rather than a wire surrogate bearing a bottle of milk.  Attesting to the primacy of love in early attachment, the monkeys chose contact comfort over food.  The (infamous) research strikes me still.  It is within the crucible of “secure” mother-infant transactions, or a loving bond with an alternative attachment figure, that one’s capacity for intimacy, and attendant features of self-worth and self-efficacy, are distilled.

We see this in the juxtaposition of Saroo’s story with that of the Brierley family’s second adopted son, Mantosh.  It’s an irony that adult Saroo was ultimately able to bear the loss of his birth family because he was anchored by the love he had known.  Conversely, family therapists often say about an adolescent’s “failure to launch” that “If you don’t belong, you can’t leave”.  Reading between the lines (notably, the fractured relationships Mantosh has with his adoptive parents and Saroo and his inability to be nurtured/comforted by these potentially restorative relationships, not to mention episodes of head banging, drug use and self-imposed exile from the world), Mantosh had experienced an early trauma of a different kind, an unspeakable kind where love does not reside (or resides no longer) and one is rendered atrophied, if not broken.  I can only guess that his trauma minimally involved neglect, but probably outright violence and abuse, with exposure to acts or circumstances that once seen cannot be erased from the mind’s eye.

Similar themes are echoed in The Light Between Oceans, a movie adaptation of the novel by M. L. Stedman.  A fictional and far-fetched tale set in post World War I Australia, a lighthouse keeper and his wife, Tom and Isabel, happen upon a boat carrying an infant girl and her dead father, conveniently right after the couple has lost its second child in utero.  Anyhoo, the couple raises “Lucy” as its own until another serendipitous sequence of events sees the four-year-old girl returned to her mother.  The child has been intensely loved by both families and she transitions, not without difficulty, back into her original family and ties are severed with Tom and Isabel.  However, an adult “Grace”, her birth name, now a mother to a baby son, seeks out Tom to find that, whilst Isabel has recently died, she has been left a letter explaining her “illicit” mother’s  actions and motives.  Lucy-Grace hasn’t just been loved, she knows it well, and gives thanks to Tom for such.  A very touching moment, yes.  Yes, I cried again.

An adult me is not convinced that all you need is love.  I have a practical side.  I know you need a whole host of other factors to get through this life relatively unscathed, maybe battered but not broken.  Hell, I’m the queen of small containers that my children carry off to school each day bearing fruit and yoghurt and other morsels to feed their growing brains.  Feeding one’s kids healthily every day requires a big commitment.  More seriously though, there are the realities of social inequity, greed and human hatred and ignorance to contend with and, where these exist, I’m fairly certain love can get crushed.  Evidence:  poverty, war, social exclusion, global warming and other damage to the planet…Need I go on?  How about the example of little Saroo, still in India, narrowly escaping being conscripted into what appears might be a pedophile ring?

Maybe it is the case that hatred and fear of others is self-hatred projected outwards.  And that love is the ultimate panacea to such.  I also know that we humans have a shadow side that must be accommodated, rather than eradicated, if we are to deal with ourselves and our relationships maturely:  genuine self-love can be a tough gig.

I think that to touch pain is to touch love.  We can all relate to loss – losing something or someone we care about, being lost, feeling lost.  There was something sweet about the shedding of communal tears that sunny day in the cinema in North Hobart.  It was an expression and a release of our shared vulnerability.  Later, as I walked out onto the street blinking in the light, I may have looked tear-stained but I felt more connected and alive.  Hallelujah for books and movies!